Late that evening, Erza and I were riding a rented magic carriage through the outskirts of the city. Well-kept estates kept popping up on either side of the road, the kind of neighborhood that made it pretty obvious this area was built for aristocrats or just people with serious money.
Our little duo had to travel halfway across the country, into territory where other guilds handled the jobs. It was no surprise we'd never been out this way before.
We pulled up to the right property soon enough, left the carriage somewhere inconspicuous, and slipped onto the grounds without any fuss. The mansion was right there waiting for us.
"About the same power level as those stowaways. Shouldn't be a problem," I said, turning to Erza. "Ready?"
She nodded, pulling the cloth I'd prepped, which was soaked in a sedative solution, from her Requip space.
I focused, and with a Teleportation spell, yanked Varik clean out of his own bed. The man barely got his eyes open before he was locked in Erza's grip. He might've tried something against me, keyword tried, but against my little sister's strength, he didn't stand a chance.
We wiped every trace, magical and otherwise, loaded the body into the carriage, and moved on.
Honestly, my first instinct had been to build a ramp and launch the whole carriage through his study window. But we were members of a light guild, and kidnapping an aristocrat wasn't exactly the kind of thing they'd just wave off. So we kept Fairy Tail clean and kept ourselves out of the spotlight.
"Ugh… Feels like a horse kicked me in the skull…" Groaning against a splitting headache because Erza had squeezed a little too hard, our captive blinked and took in his surroundings. He was sprawled in the back of a magic carriage, a blinding light overhead. When he hauled himself upright, he found a dark forest staring back at him, me staring back at him with all the warmth of a February morning, and my sister, whose expression wasn't promising anything good either. He glanced down at his wrists and found magic-suppressing cuffs. "What the hell?!"
"There's a shovel next to you. Start digging," I said.
The man was putting the pieces together fast, and his face was losing color to match.
"Kids?! Hey… What's going on? I don't even know you…"
"Two years ago. Village of Rosemary," I said.
"We didn't kill you on the spot for a reason," Erza added, reminding herself as much as him. "Start talking. Who else was working with you for the Tower? System R."
Erza had never taken any pleasure in drawing out a kill, or in killing at all, for that matter. But the fact that Varik clearly hadn't been working alone was what made us drag this out.
The man squinted, studied us, and then recognition finally crossed his face.
"Wait? you're the ones I took a contract on recently?! You're… from Fairy Tail? How are wizards from a light guild even—"
I walked over, grabbed him, and threw him on the ground. The shovel landed next to him.
He used it as a crutch to pull himself up, already sweating.
"You don't want to die screaming. So do what you're told." With those words, I let my Bloodlust bleed out into the air around us, flooding the darkness red and filling it with the smell of iron. Come on, hurry it up. Standing around in a forest in the middle of the night because of this piece of garbage wasn't exactly my idea of a good time.
The man had already been pale. Now he went white. Being cuffed, kidnapped, and dumped in the woods was bad enough, but my aura sealed the deal.
"You… I get it now. You were slaves I helped capture. And the people you were after…" Credit to him, he was quick on the uptake. "This is all so scrambled! But this is one giant misunderstanding! I can explain everything!"
"Oh, by all means," came Erza's voice, dripping with skepticism.
My expression made him grip the shovel even tighter.
"I need to… start from the beginning!" He launched into a stumbling explanation.
Cutting out all the stammering and backtracking, here's what it boiled down to: The Aquavitt family, Varik's bloodline, had been in construction for generations. Deep roots, solid supplier connections, the whole dynasty thing. Then one day, some dark wizards came knocking with an offer he couldn't refuse. Just like that, this aristocrat became a lapdog for a cult that had him by the throat since he wasn't about to lose everything his family had spent lifetimes building.
"Why didn't you just go to the Magic Council?" Erza pressed.
"Because that would've accomplished absolutely nothing! Those maggots have direct ties to the Balam Alliance! Even if I'd hidden in Era, everything my family built over generations… They would've found a way to strip it bare! And then they would've killed me!"
The Balam Alliance, for context, was a coalition of dark guilds with three of the most powerful dark guilds at the top. Together, they basically served as a counterweight to the Magic Council.
"Strip it bare is a stretch. More likely the Council would've put your family's business under their oversight," I corrected the water wizard.
"That's the same thing! And those pigs would've sat on it forever and never given it back! You know how long they take to do anything? They move like sloths in heat!" he said, very passionately.
"Right. So the bad men and women made you do all the dirty work, and you're the poor innocent victim here."
"I… Well, yeah!"
"That was sarcasm," Erza translated flatly. Her face made it clear she wasn't buying any of it. "Your crew captured and killed people. There's no justification for that. You should have handed the family business over to the Magic Council and saved innocent lives."
Varik's expression shifted into something wounded, loudly broadcasting that the world is so unfair and everyone around him is a criminal.
"You had a cartel. Explain it," I pushed, getting back on track.
"Oh, that… Mistakes of youth! That's literally how those people found me in the first place. But we were just hired guns!"
"Manhunters?" I clarified.
"That too, sometimes… It varied."
"And you took a contract on us? Slipping back into old habits?"
"That was all the baron! After the power shift in the Tower, I swore off that kind of work! I was just growing the family business. But that son of a hyena and a jackal offered a lot of money and said you were… What was the word? Crooks? That you'd tortured him. And besides, it was a contract like any other bounty job! Sure, you're from Fairy Tail. But you know how it is, not every wizard in a guild is clean. Some get kicked out for good reasons…"
"Stop trying to dress this up." My patience was wearing thin. "You didn't take the job because the payout was too good to pass up. A construction company your size brings in serious money, and that baron, from what I know of him, was cheap and barely worth a damn. You just wanted to feel alive again, didn't you?"
"Even if that's true, it doesn't change anything!"
"That specific detail changes very little. But the fact that you went back to killing children, which was fully your own call with no pressure this time, doesn't exactly paint you in a flattering light. Start digging. And start talking. Who else do you remember from the Tower?"
My cold words sent a chill through him. Desperation settled onto his face. He finally picked up the shovel and started digging.
"Nobody's left. Of the aristocrats, I was the only one who got out," he said, hunched over.
"Lucky you."
We stood in silence for a minute while the hole went from small to less small.
Then the man stopped. Like someone grabbing at a last lifeline, he turned to face us.
"My construction business brings in a lot of money! Maybe… we could work something out?"
It seemed like as much as the family legacy mattered to him, his own life mattered a little more.
Erza raised an eyebrow.
"Do you understand how many lives you've destroyed? After everything you've done? No."
My answer, on the other hand, wasn't so clear-cut. A thoughtful look crossed my face.
"It's a big risk. You could sell us out, and that creates certain problems."
My sister nodded.
"But… Hm. I have an idea." I closed the distance to Varik in an instant, moving fast enough to make him flinch, and knocked him out cold.
"Lian?" Erza asked, not following.
"His money… We might actually need it. And as long as he's alive, it's the cleanest way to legitimize things."
"Explain."
So I did. That S-Class exam, and then the run-in with Gildarts, had both gently reminded me that I wasn't the biggest fish in this pond. Far from the smallest, sure. But there were people out there who could wipe the floor with me. If Gildarts decided he wanted to do something to me, I couldn't do a damn thing about it. And maybe he wouldn't, but there were other wizards out there at his level, or possibly beyond it. That was power I probably couldn't reach in ten years if I was being honest with myself. That realization had collided hard with everything this man, this Varik, stirred up in me. It was the helplessness of losing, the feeling of having your own fate ripped out of your hands.
I was scared of that happening again. It was as simple as that. And that fear made me want more power.
But nothing in this world comes from thin air. Everything has a price. I needed material resources, and this aristocrat could foot the bill. He would not just be building me a palace, though that was on the table too, but funding a laboratory. It would be something like what I'd had access to in my previous world, a place where I could seriously dig into medicine and the physical transformation of my own body to push past its limits.
That was the gist of what I laid out for my sister.
"You never told me the weakness was eating at you like this," Erza said softly.
"Hey! It's not eating at me. I just want to get rid of it. And an opportunity just landed in our lap." I nodded toward the wizard still crumpled on the ground. "Also, I'm just using him. After that, our score gets settled."
"Alright, if you're handling it." She let out a breath. "Can you actually control him well enough that we don't bring trouble down on ourselves?"
"Fifty-fifty." I walked over, grabbed the man by his hair, and pried his eyes open. "I'm going to go digging around in his head. Either it works, or he ends up a vegetable."
I introduced a solution into our unwilling patient, one designed to soften the magic in his brain. Then, from my eye, the one wired into my own energy, I fired a beam of Ether. It connected with Varik's eye and drove a channel through his magical defenses. Soul Energy poured through the tunnel I'd built.
There is Ether magic that works with memories, but it's complicated, half-banned, and I hadn't studied it deeply. So I fell back on what I knew from my previous world.
The process stretched to about half an hour because I wanted this to hold. Erza waited off to the side. Her principles didn't approve of methods like this. The only thing keeping her from saying something was the fact that I was doing it to a man who'd taken a contract on our lives.
Finally, I stepped back from Varik, tired but satisfied.
"Success! This idiot is genuinely lucky!"
"What the—" He came to.
"Congratulations! I've cursed you. If you try to sell us out to anyone, or even think about trying to remove the curse, you'll start dying in agony," I informed him pleasantly, delivering a slightly twisted version of the truth. That way, even if he managed to find someone to try breaking it, he'd be looking in completely the wrong direction. Then I grabbed him by the hair again, hauled him up over his squirming protests, and tossed him into the carriage. "Let's go, minion. We've got a lot to talk about."
On the way, I started pulling information out of him and working through the details with the sullen wizard. We planned how he was going to start helping someone as noble and righteous as myself in a way that wouldn't raise any eyebrows. We also made sure not to tank the business or leave Varik himself completely destitute, so the man could keep functioning as a capable operator.
Soon enough, we dropped him back at his own estate.
"Got all that?" I checked, like a boss.
"Yes… Write detailed reports on everything. Burn the cartel and hand it over to the Magic Council. Contact you every week on the lacrima you left me."
"Perfect. No more crime, and do what Uncle Elian says. Until next time." I gave him a wave, and our carriage rolled on.
"Still… That's a terrifying kind of magic," my sister said once we were far enough away that no one could hear.
"It is what it is. But it has its limits. Leaving a couple of painful triggers is one thing, but making someone obey every single command is a whole other story. You'd basically have to dismantle their entire personality to pull that off. If anyone can even do that, it'd be some ancient dark wizard. And even then, if the target knows how to resist, odds are it won't work at all."
"All these dark arts… Invented by real pieces of work."
"Just like me! Ha-ha-ha-ha!"
"Lian, don't say that… You're a good piece of work. Unlike them."
"Depends on your perspective. I'm pretty sure Varik has a very different opinion of me right now."
"Hm. Where to next?" Erza rested her head on my shoulder, done with all the crap the day had thrown at us.
"Back to Era. The baron, remember…" I had one hand on the reins and wrapped the other around my sister. "But I can handle it myself. You don't have to—"
"No!" She sat up, then settled back against my shoulder. "I'm not dumping all the dirty work on you. These are our problems. We deal with them together."
"Aww…" I genuinely melted a little, even given that we were talking about how we were going to put a man in the ground. Okay, but it was genuinely sweet of her.
Come morning, we returned the carriage to the rental company, who had absolutely no idea what their vehicle had been used for, and boarded a train toward the city where Magic Council headquarters were located.
It didn't take long before we were back in a carriage late at night, pulling up to a house. It was not a wealthy estate this time, but a perfectly ordinary neighborhood. We used the same routine, just slightly modified: the carriage was bigger, with an enclosed compartment. Teleport the target to Erza, and the carriage was rolling again before anyone could notice anything suspicious. It wasn't as if anyone was peering out their windows at four in the morning anyway.
Soon enough, we were in another forest. It was a different city, but the trees looked the same.
"I've been driving a lot of people into the woods lately," I muttered, pulling the carriage to a stop. "Maybe I should open a tour company."
"We already have a business," Erza remarked, dragging the baron's body out and dropping him in the grass.
"Learn his motives first?"
"Not worth it. It'll be the same story. Nothing but lies… And Lian, you're not lying to me about anything, are you?" she asked, and there was something genuinely vulnerable in it.
"Only things I leave out. The truth is, I was created by an otherworldly God-Emperor. Or rather, I am him. Same soul."
Her momentarily dropped mood snapped back up into extreme skepticism.
"You could've come up with something better than that."
"Then the only time I've lied to you was during sparring. Which you already know about." I shrugged and drew my sword.
"No… This was my idea to spare him." Erza pulled her blade from her Requip space and drove it through the baron's chest without hesitation. The sword caught the moonlight a second time as she flicked the blood clean, spattering the trees around her. "Let's go."
I used Earth Magic to bury the body deep. Then we drove home.
Instead of sitting with all the dark weight of the night, we started talking about what we'd want in our new mansion. Because yes, we were about to have one of those. It would be built from scratch.
I didn't push her on whether she was hiding anything from me. I knew her better than anyone, and nothing came to mind that she could possibly be concealing. The forbidden thing wasn't a secret from me, even if I'd never mentioned it to anyone else.
As for La Gravia, his story ended before it could even properly begin. Though honestly, it wasn't hard to figure out. The man had been spiteful, not particularly bright, and scared enough to act on it. He'd moved against us. And in a way, he'd gotten lucky because that bluster I'd fed him about Fairy Tail's connections had been mostly true, but Makarov didn't exactly run anything resembling a national intelligence service. The guild would've made him pay if something had happened to us, but hiring assassins? Nobody was really stopping him. So the man had apparently racked up some debts with a mob or whoever, off the books, and used them to put a hit on us through other criminals. It was just his bad luck that their spy had been sloppy, and not a single one of their hired killers got close enough to matter before we rolled right over all of them.
Another week passed. We were back in Magnolia.
Between handling a mountain of logistics, most of it delegated to my minion Varik, things had somehow worked out so that a pair of modest twins by the names of Elian and Erza found themselves in possession of a very large plot of land by the lake, not far from the guild hall. And right now, right on schedule, a crew of specialized wizards had shown up to level the ground. I stood there watching them work, thoroughly pleased with myself.
"You two really went for it," Makarov commented from beside me, smoothing his mustache as he looked over the work crews. "But yeah, with S-Class, you can afford it."
My thoughts weren't really on the house, though. They kept drifting to the laboratory, which was already going up in another part of the city, and everything I was going to put in it.
It was time to start taking magic seriously.